What Mends But Stays

The line is still there.

Thin, almost faded,

but there—

a mark that won't quite leave,

a thin reminder

of the time they had to stitch me back together.

I was looking at it this morning,

getting dressed,

and it hit me:

this scar is going to stay.

It will fade, maybe,

but it's not going anywhere.

It's part of the skin now.

It's part of the story

of how this arm

got broken and then got fixed

and got broken in a way

that required someone else's hands

to make it whole again.

The stitches are out.

They took them out two weeks ago,

and I felt relief—

oh, it's healing, it's over, it's done.

But the line remained.

The barely perceptible dots

where they went through

one side to the other,

where they sewed me up

like fabric.

I'm not the same as I was.

Not broken anymore, but marked.

The skin remembers even when it forgets.

The scar is a conversation

between what was torn

and what was mended,

a line that says:

you were hurt here.

Someone fixed it.

But you'll always know

exactly where.

I run my finger over it sometimes,

feeling the slight ridge,

the texture of healing,

and I think:

this is what it means to be put back together—

you get your wholeness back,

but you don't get your innocence.

The wound stays visible.

The evidence stays.

The mark says:

you've been broken.

And that's not something

that ever really leaves.